We need literature because we wouldn’t fully know ourselves without it. We need good literature to be fully human.

Whole interaction between the storyteller and the listeners had a very powerful influence on me.

When you write ,it's like braiding your hair. Taking a handful of coarse unruly strands and attempting to bring then unity.

People often think of Haiti as a place where you're not supposed to have any joy. I wanted to show that this is a place with joy.

Write what haunts you. What keeps you up at night. What you are unable to get out of your mind. Sometimes they are the hardest things to write, but those are often the things that are worth investigating by you specifically. . .

There are many possible interpretations of what it means to create dangerously, and Albert Camus, like the poet Osip Mandelstam, suggests that it is creating as a revolt against silence, creating when both the creation and the reception, the writing and the reading, are dangerous undertakings, disobedience to a directive.

Language is such a powerful thing. After the earthquake, I went to Haiti and people were talking about how [they] described this feeling of going through an earthquake. People really didn't have the vocabulary - before we had hurricanes. I'd talk with people and they'd say, "We have to name it; it has to have a name."